I was considering writing a blog post on starting again or new beginnings , but there’s been a few of those over the years, n’est-ce pas. So in the spirit of a post-punk age, I give you ‘Ivan-Remastered’ – all the hits you missed the first time around. Ok, maybe not ‘hits’. Maybe more 4AM 6Music R playlist. But more seriously, this time feels a little … different.
First and foremost, I’m a little older and perhaps a little wiser. As most people learn over time, it’s easier to shuffle into change than to try to suddenly sprint in a new direction. Ease in, and learn to enjoy the process. This isn’t kind of like some big … I don’t know … melodramatic change driven by internal angst or mid-life crisis. It’s just simply that you get to a point with things where you need to say ‘enough’. Enough of that, and more of this. The specifics of the ‘that’ don’t really matter, but I’m trying to focus more on creative effort and less on creative product. This ties in more generally to an increased awareness of process, and simple pleasures in doing and being, rather than striving.
The Re-arrangement
I’m calling it a Re-arrangement. I like the capitalisation. Isn’t it grand? I like ‘R”s, almost as much as I like ‘K’s and ‘Q’s. I digress.
Yes, I’ve been rearranging. The germ of this is a mental re-adjustment, triggered by a friend of mine who has introduced me to the field of awe studies. It turns out that awe is rather special, and a form of emotional resilience in the face of change. And we live in turbulent times, do we not? So triggering awe is a really useful thing to be able to do. Our individual triggers vary, although researchers have found various common themes. In working with my friend to develop tools and other things to help people understand and channel awe I’ve built a little game called SPARK!. And it’s in the spirit of this game that I have deliberately sought to fill more of my day with sparks, and less with the relentless enshittification of the internet. In my case, to re-awaken awe and channel positive things, I have arrived at a more conscious need for art – and specific kinds of art (more on this later).
But sparks need space to thrive. So I’ve been re-arranging spaces – leaving digital spaces, reducing the activities that don’t bring me joy; changing my physical space; overwriting habits. I fear I would disgust my younger self, but I have even started experimenting with simply talking myself into doing things differently (e.g. ‘I am the kind of person who puts their shoes away’). Small things… after all, I am not committing to untying my shoelaces (yet). I’m not mad. But many small things can over time become a big thing.
A space to make / making space
I have spent the best part of two days moving the contents of my work and studio spaces around, which has involved decanting multiple cupboards, umpteen shelves of books, tools and materials, and arranging my space in more logical groupings. Echoes of a former self – my vinyl, graphic novels, science fiction and even some of my writing have been made visible and accessible again. I have culled 50-80 books, but still kept close to 400. Plenty of these books are unread, and never will be read. But I’ve always taken the view that my purchasing is part of the pay-it-forward part of life. I guess that’s a collector, rather than a reader.
Anyway. As part of this re-arrangement, I’ve discovered treasures that I had long forgotten, and many ‘repeats’. I’m well aware of this particular trait of mine that I tend to have the same idea often. (The example that always comes to mind is the time I asked my then favourite author to dedicate a book , to discover I’d already dedicated it myself. The horror, the horror.) In physical terms it means I have enough adhesive to last me 10 years, and enough greybeard and book cloth to run a small press (now there’s an idea).
At various points I seem to have been obsessed with having different specifications of the same thing. Which means three laying presses, three standing presses. Board in five thicknesses. Silk thread in colours I can’t pronounce. Enough waste paper to make a Daily Mail. As with many things to do with art and craft in particular, I seem to put a lot of stock in having tools and materials and manuals, and much less stock and in actually doing any of this. This is how I explain the manuals on writing sitcoms and spoon whittling. But I’m not sure it explains the Cambridge Illustrated History of Food or How to read a Church. Anyway, ’tis done now, and clearly the purchasing if not the filing and the using has made me somewhat happier at some point. We move on.
Arranging boxes
I found something this week which amused me… the concept of an artists’ arranging box, and that is very close to my idea for a story box, which is also very close, to be fair, to the idea that people at craft shows will sell you a collage kit which is full of old scraps and materials that that you then make into something else. Whereas my story box idea has some kind of guiding conceit behind it, some kind of narrative bone structure that you could use if you wanted to, whereas arrangement boxes, arranging boxes, sorry, I found them published by a Irish press seem to commission different artists to create one off. Well, unlike mine, these boxes are then collected and end up in libraries and museums and whatever, which is quite odd, considering that it’s probably not a very representative sample of any particular artist’s work, I’d have thought. But anyway, there it is. In the meantime I’ll plough on with devising my next story box….
Remastered
The other form of arranging that I’ve been very much into this week is compositions inspired by Northern industrial landscapes. To quote one of the artists ‘ Half–remembered journeys across post-industrial Yorkshire.
This describes one of the two bands that are entering my orbit because they are supporting to Mogwai at various points this year. The first one is Forest Swords, who I now seen live in Cambridge. And that was extraordinary. A really, really impressive, and awesome, as in, it left an impression of awe in me performance by Matthew Barnes. It’ss just him and some electronics and a really, really interesting light show and this kind of weird, kind of loopy, lopey, I wouldn’t really call it dance music, but you kind of, you do, kind of, I don’t know you do, kind of bend and bob and nod, almost without control.
The other artist, from which the quote comes is Craven Faults, and I knew nothing about him, and I put it on the speaker in the car when I was driving the other night. I drive an electric car which has a big tablet-like display, and it was nighttime, and the roads were largely empty, and modern cars, you have this kind of slight kind of cabin glow on the inside. The lights from cars tend to be kind of more horizontal and kind of strip, kind of LED type lights, rather than what you see in films of cars which is kind of very much kind of round tail lights and kind of kind of vertical kind of blur, if you see what I mean. Which is absurd in trying to describe any feeling as ‘horizontal’ rather than ‘vertical’. But it made sense at them time. And listening to Craven Faults (all 16 min bleepy bloop epics) and driving along in this car in the dark, it was amazing. I really felt like I was in the future. I felt I haven’t seen the Ryan Gosling film. I think it’s called Drive but there’s a very similar film – It may even have been the one that was based on, which I think Tom Hardy is in where all that happens is, or what mostly happens is a man driving alone in a car down motorways talking on the phone. Irrelevant detail, but you might want to watch it some day. I can tell I’m selling it.
Anyway. It was a very profoundly moving experience, both literally and physically. This, ironically, is not awe. It is simply art. But, I it was quite something to be so aware of how alive I felt in that moment, and what it meant to be alive.
Endinnings
I’m rearranging my time as well, so I will continue to update this as I see fit and amuse myself. Even in writing this, I’ve actually enjoyed my own tangents. Which is just as well I used to worry a lot about having an audience while not having an audience. But it just doesn’t matter. The bit that matters is whether I enjoy what I’m doing or not.
So I’m just going to quietly rearrange my thinking and hopefully see you soon.
Love and rockets,
I.
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